Also, never power up or down, or switch in or out of airplane mode on your burner while at home (or work). Cellular network disconnection and connection events are rare and hence notable.
Normally, unless (as I mentioned in another reply) you buy your SIM at a going-away party for a foreign student or backpacker who's leaving the country and doesn't need a local mobile number any more.
(Then you just need to worry about the CCTV recording of the place where you pay cash tor the pre paid Visa cards you use to top up the prepaid SIM...)
That would be properly dumb thing to do, giving trivial-to-track thing very much tied to your identity to some random folks... why on earth would anybody smart ever do that?
Then you suddenly end up locked by ICE or worse when having layover stop at Miami for example.
Because they're leaving the country tomorrow and don't plan on ever coming back. And you offered them a round of drinks or two for them and their other friends.
(Thinking about it, you're probably right - I still feel that's "safe" in Australia, I doubt I'd be prepared to do that in 2025 USA. But then I'm not intending to visit the USA in the near/medium term future, or possibly ever again.)
If you become of enough interest to the sort of people who will interview everybody who was any a party at a bar to try and identify who someone that's left the country gave their SIM to, you're probably well beyond fucked already.
Amateur opsec can help prevent you getting identified if you leave footprints in dragnet surveillance - like if you were at or near a protest. If you're planning on committing crimes serious enough to have "basic police work" set loose attempting to identify you individually? Good luck with that. I hope you're getting better advice than posts from randoms on internet forums.
True. Replace "crime" with "things that motivate the government to investigate you". They arent the same but overlap alot of course. In 2025 the non intersecting area got larger.
> "things that motivate the government to investigate you"
Yeah, as I wrote elsewhere in this discussion: "running a global drug cartel, or criticising Saudi Royal Families, or defending the rights of Palestinian children to not be bombed"
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think that running out of battery or rebooting a phone is that rare.
But more importantly, if these events are noticeable and Alice does what you suggest she is probably going to highlight her location. Especially if she naively waits till she is 15 minutes from home to switch her burner on. Over time there will be a circle around her house of no burner phone network attach events.
I'd be surprised if my daily driver phone ran out of battery more than once or twice a year. It probably only ever reboots in exactly the same 24 hour time window as every other iPhone during iOS updates.
If Alice's threat model doesn't include NSA/KGB/MSS/MOSSAD, just being slightly less naive and switching on the burner at (or within a set distance from) some location other than her home is likely fine. I describe in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45009042 how I used to automate turning on a phone (well, a 3G WiFi hotspot) at a set distance from a nearby library.
But don't follow my advice if you're running a global drug cartel, or criticising Saudi Royal Families, or defending the rights of Palestinian children to not be bombed.
(I just realised my phone goes into and out of airplane mode when I get on and off planes, which narrows it down to one in a couple of hundred people for one flight, and likely uniquely identifies me with only two or perhaps 3 flights. But this is my daily driver phone with proper KYC identification, not a burner.)
> What about elevators, parking garages, basements?
If Snowden was an ex-colleage of mine, I suspect I or my co workers probably combine location data with network attach/detach messages, and can filter out "known blackspots" on a per network/carrier basis.
> Your "Recreational Paranoia" should include rebooting your iPhone more often.
Ah ha! But my recreational paranoia hobby includes having a perfectly normal "daily driver" phone - which gets left at home way more often than other people's phones.
